I’m the first revenue operations hire in my company. What advice would you give to someone tasked with establishing this function in an existing business structure?

My number one piece of advice is to ask a lot of questions. Some questions to get you started could be:

1. What is your scope? For example, will you be primarily focused on sales operations? Or are Customer Success and Enablement also in your scope?

2. What are your immediate priorities? Are you there to solve an immediate problem for the company? Or does sales leadership need help in creating those priorities and focus areas?

3. What do your tech stack and data foundations look like? Who manages them? How do you go about implementing changes?

My second piece of advice would be to learn your business quickly.  

1. Learn your key products and competitors.

2. Understand all of your customer facing roles and their corresponding responsibilities.

3. Define your key performance indicators and understand what metrics matter most to your business.

4. Get to know your tech stack and data sources.

My third piece of advice would be to establish an operating rhythm.

1. Determine your frequency and content for business reviews to better assess the business health.

2. Kick off regular structured forecasting meetings and monthly or quarterly business reviews.  

Lastly, in my previous AMA, I included a template to help you exceed in your first 30/60/90 days in role. It focuses on planning across Strategy, Operations, Data & Systems and Team and Talent. You can find the link here to the framework. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOCTEDa_ezcSW0lUOgvQCt4csqunc7gg7n5VyAHb3Hw/edit?usp=sharing